


Keep the Car Running

by witchoil



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Background Reylo, Elements Blatantly Stolen from The Expanse, Forced Teamwork, Gen, Handwaving, Kylo Ren Has A Nerd Voice, Nerd Bonding, POV Rose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 03:25:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13262625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchoil/pseuds/witchoil
Summary: When life hands you lemons, you work together with your suspiciously docile political enemy to make lemonade.(OR: Two massive nerds stumble into the unlikeliest interstellar roadtrip since 0 BBY.)





	Keep the Car Running

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt-fill on tumblr for @laureljupiter!
>
>> because I'm totally ridiculous and this is my new platonic crackship: 18 for Ben Solo and Rose Tico as nerd teamup forced to work together and developing A Rapport.
>> 
>> “Literally everything about this is illegal!”

Rose watches him work from behind, half grateful and half incensed.

On the one hand, they’re barreling away from the _Ascendancy_ , the First Order’s newest flagship, at high speed. She’s safe – relatively – and on her way home after only a day in a holding cell that could have easily become an eternity. Things are as good as they’ve been in at least a week, and for Rose that’s saying a lot.

But on the other hand… The other half of this ‘they’ is Kylo Ren, the one and only Supreme Leader of that same Order from which they’re currently running.

He opened her cell an hour ago with a serious look on his face that said he didn’t want to think about what he was doing. She nearly pissed herself in terror but put on a brave face.

“Here to kill me?” She asked him, impressing herself with her defiance.

“Shut up,” said Kylo Ren, in a low and slightly nasal voice. “She sent me. We’re going.”

“I’m not going _anywhere_ ,” Rose spat back. “Not with you. Who sent you?”

She could see the tops of his bottom teeth as he sucked in a breath. He closed his eyes. “Rey.”

She scoffed, put off by his dramatics and disbelieving to boot. “ _Rey_ sent you.”

“Don’t sound so incredulous about things you don’t understand.”

If the look on his face hadn’t convinced her of the honesty of this frankly baffling admission, his sharp and perfect recitation of her last conversation with Rey did. It was like he’d been sitting with them in her room, taking notes on the strange and meandering argument they had about repairing the new base’s laundry equipment.

It was, in a word, unnerving.

But then again, Rose muses now, watching dumbfounded as Ren’s upper half disappears into an access panel on his own personal shuttle to _rip out the fusebox that powers the ship’s tracker_ , what about him _isn’t_ unnerving?

“Literally everything about this is illegal!” She half yells, half hisses.

Kylo Ren grunts as he knocks against something on his way out of the panel. He has a sparking fusebox in one hand and a hydrospanner in the other, slightly charred from where she assumes he used it to pry off the fusebox.

“Appropriate that now would be the time I start living up to the name.” He sounds almost wistful.

He stands and drops the fusebox onto the nearest surface, a built-in bench along the wall. He towers over her, but Rose hardly notices, confused and on-guard at his cryptic admission. “What?” She asks, chin tilted high.

“What do you care about legality, anyway? You’re a Rebel.”

“What do you mean ‘living up to the name?’”

He looks taken aback. “What do you mean, ‘What do you mean?’”

Rose wrenches the spanner from his hand and brandishes it at him. “Don’t repeat my question back at me!”

“You don’t know who I am?”

“Of _course_ I know who you are, Kylo Ren.” She spits the name at him, already tired of whatever game this is. “You’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to the galaxy.”

“No,” he says, a little quieter. “Before that.”

Rose grits her teeth. She wants to scream. “Out with it! We don’t have time for a dramatic reveal right now!” There’s a following pause and she’s about to warn him not to bother if it’ll make her hate him any more than she already does, when—

“Ben Solo,” Kylo Ren says, voice low, eyes lower. “That was my name.”

She can tell he’s expecting a gasp, the gentle cracking of a world-altering revelation. And maybe three weeks ago – before Finn and Rey and narrowly escaping death on Crait and the First Order beginning its incomprehensible and rapid implosion – she would have obliged him.

But Rose Tico is different now. More skeptical, yes, but also less afraid.

Which might be why she reaches up to grab his chin and tilts his face down towards her. Her eyes skim the flaring bridge of his nose, the feline tilt to his eyes, the unruly, triangular brows. She scrunches up her nose, remembering what she can of Han Solo’s face from the holos she’s seen.

_Fair enough_ , she thinks, _that might as well be true, too_.

He’s surprisingly calm for someone being manhandled by an enemy, if that’s still what they are.

“Well, _Solo_ , put it to some kriffing use.”

She can tell that the smile he cracks is supposed to be charming – that it would have been on Han’s face, all loose and careless – and she could have tolerated it to be menacing, even sad.

But what it is instead is absolutely _goofy_.

His cheeks wing out and he has a gap between his front and eye teeth on both sides. Even worse, he has dimples. Rose can’t help herself. Her eyes roll back.

They’re flying through First Order-controlled space in a ship that is (probably) technically stolen, possibly about to do irreparable damage to the Order, and _definitely_ going to do irreparable damage to the (probably) stolen ship in the process. Disabling the tracker will be absolutely necessary to making their escape through hyperspace, but the entrances and exits of the lanes are now fully monitored by the Order, meaning that they’ll be apprehended almost instantly once they emerge out of FTL.

No matter how much Rose knows they’re doing the right thing, it doesn’t change how kriffing _dangerous_ it is, nor how stupid.

She tells him as much.

“Son of Han Solo or not, you can’t fly a ship that’s, one, in a million pieces or, two, booted by C-Dot.”

“Then let’s not get booted.”

“Uh-uh,” Rose says, actually wagging a finger in the face of Kylo Ren, menace of the galaxy. “Let’s just boot them _first_.”

“It’s an expensive ship, but there aren’t any torpedoes.”

“No, we can be more clever than that.”

“We?”

“What do you know about electrical interference?”

A distant, slightly horrified look crosses his face. “Some. Biologically speaking.”

“That’s fine,” Rose says. “I know enough. What weapons _do_ we have?”

“There’s a standard short-range IR-73 blast canon mounted under the hull and a miniature rail gun under the cockpit,” he snaps, having written enough reports on this shuttle to answer Rose’s question without reflection.

“Wow,” Rose says, flat and sarcastic, “I’m surprised it’s not an IR-80. And here I thought you liked your guns big.”

Kylo huffs something like a laugh and follows after Rose as she goes to the cockpit. The IR-80 is the blast generator that sits inside the surface cannons of a star destroyer. Mount one on a ship this size and it’d blow you back twenty-thousand clicks every time you fired.

“That’s actually—”

“What General Hux suggested in the armaments meeting yesterday,” she finishes for him, giggling as she goes to tap her handheld splicer into the cockpit’s main console. “I know.”

Kylo Ren tilts his head, looking for all the world like a curious akk dog. Rose raises her brows and jiggles the splicer in her hand, a small, satisfied smile dimpling her cheeks.

“Didn’t have a lot else to do. Thought I’d get intel, listening in on the monitors, got a laugh instead.”

Rose ducks away to focus on her task, muttering and swearing under her breath as she fights the override protocols coded into the ship.

“Okay, almost there.” She presses a button and swivels as a hatch opens nearby. “Grab us those PPE’s.” She points and Kylo obeys, large body crossing the cabin’s vertical and horizontal space with little more than a stretch. Rose isn't one to bemoan her stature, but she kind of wishes she could do that.

Kylo Ren tosses her a suit and begins pulling his own on. “The oscillator, right? From the life support block.”

“Yeah,” Rose says, pleasantly surprised by his deference to her orders. “We’ll vent the ship.”

“Then move it into the charging block of the rail gun.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know much about electrical interference.”

“I don’t,” he says, zipping up the rubberized collar of the suit. “But she does.”

This time Rose’s brows and lips scrunch up with her nose. “You mean Rey again. You can say her name, you know.”

His eyes sweep down. Rose’s brain momentarily short-circuits as she recognizes the look and color on his face. He’s…bashful? Embarrassed? Maker, she really doesn’t have time for whatever _this_ is.

“You know what?” She flicks a hand in front of herself, as if shooing a fly. “I’m not gonna worry about it.”

He seems relieved, nodding as he pulls on his helmet.

“For now,” she adds. _But just try to stop me later_.

Once they’re suited up, Rose presses another button and the hum of the shuttle’s engine vibrates just lower than before.

After a quick test of the suits’ comm system and a suspiciously synchronized nod, Rose initiates the depressurizing sequence and they’re plunged into the echoey silence of the vacuum.

They work with minimal banter this time, careful to avoid jostling the oscillator and hooking it into the rail gun’s generator system with careful, coordinated hands.

Rose explains in a soothing, even rhythm how the oscillator will charge the rail gun bolts with ionic energy. At the low-power setting she’s programmed into it, that will make the bolts effectively nonlethal, but perfect for their intentions. The ionic charge will ripple through the systems of the traffic monitoring stations and reverse the current on board for a few microseconds. They’ll essentially have a small power surge, but won’t go offline. If they time it right, they won’t even notice the shuttle at all. If they time it wrong, they’ll notice the shuttle but not its missing tracker. They’ll get by on looks. It’s actually…she takes a moment to be proud of herself. It’s actually a pretty foolproof plan.

To her surprise, Kylo Ren agrees.

What’s more, they manage to pull it off. Even in two layers of gloves and a terribly restricting helmet, Kylo is a damn good pilot, managing to target and hit the nearest waystation before the ship stops lurching from their jump out of hyperspace. Doesn’t even use the tracking systems. Is that how the Force works? Rose will have to ask Rey.

Or, well, she guesses she could ask Kylo. Once this is over.

Once they’re past the scanning range of the traffic stations and have returned the oscillator to life support, they hang around in the cockpit, PPE’s half-peeled off with the arms tied at their waists. Just in case they have to suit up again. Kylo taps on the ship’s cloaking and spools his body comfortably into the co-pilot’s chair.

“Shouldn’t you be—?” Rose asks, gesturing to the other chair.

His eyes flicker to hers in confusion, then it clicks. “I usually don’t, uh—”

“Oh,” she says. Huh.

He stiffens, “I can—”

“No, that’s fine. I can fly.”

He coughs low in his throat, looking away and running a hand through his hair. Scrunched up like this, he actually looks capable of feeling self-conscious. Scratch that, he does look self-conscious. Rose recognizes it, feels sympathetic to it, even against her better judgment.

Things have been changing fast, recently. She’s starting to give up on fighting it anymore.

“Also, uh, ‘shut up’? Seriously?”

He shoots her an indignant look.

It doesn’t frighten her at all. And from what she can tell through her steely and unwavering gaze, he can tell that it doesn’t. His face softens just a little in response.

“It’s been…” Silence stretches out as his gaze falls out of focus, swimming through the endless mid-distance of space.

“One hell of a week,” she says, “I know.”

He leans back and kicks his feet up on the console. “Of course you do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to all of my friends and mutuals out here encouraging this terrible behavior and to James S.A. Corey for all of the worldbuilding I'm selectively thieving to satisfy my own need to create Scientific Logic Puzzles. The phrase PPE stands for Personal Protection Equipment and is -- as you can guess -- essentially just a space suit.
> 
> Speaking of, you should all go watch The Expanse; the fandom is heartbreakingly small and we could use you.


End file.
